Laws and Their Exceptions

Laws and exceptions seem to be in conflict. A law is supposed to be universal, applying at all times and places, whereas an exception must be a contravention of such universality. The solution proposed here is that while laws are in a sense universal in scope, their content concerns what is disposed to happen only—what tends to be—rather than what is necessitated. What we take to be exceptions will typically be cases where those dispositions are, for whatever reason, unmanifested. The exceptions are not, therefore, to the laws themselves but instead point to the relatively commonplace and unproblematic notion that dispositional processes can fail to manifest. Given that the law has only a dispositional import, however, it is not violated, and thus remains a law applying to everything within its scope, even if there are exception cases

Conflict of laws · Epistemology · Law and economics · Physics · Political science · Scope (computer science · Sociology · Universal law · Universality (dynamical systems · Computer Science · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Natural law · Philosophy of nature · Science